Domestic Violets
Domestic Violets
A Novel
Matthew Norman
For Kate & Caroline
As you’ve already been told in the fine print above all the copyright information, this book is a work of fiction. However, many people, places, and things mentioned throughout are very real—particularly the movies. Because I’ve been so flagrant in my blending of the real and not real, I should probably mention that I’ve taken some liberties with timing. I tried to make things chronologically accurate, but sometimes things just don’t line up right, and so you’re forced to blur the edges a little. I appreciate your understanding.
—M.N.
Contents
I
splash cold water
on my face.
This is what men in movies do when they’re about to fly off the handle, when shit is getting out of control. I do this sometimes. I react to things based on what characters in movies would do. That’s kind of ironic, considering I’ve always thought of myself as a book person.
At least I think that’s ironic. That word gets misused a lot.
The water isn’t refreshing like it’s supposed to be. It’s ice-cold and I gasp. As it swirls into a little cyclone on its way down the drain, I look in the mirror, ashamed and angry at myself.
There’s something wrong. With my penis.
It’s been an unpredictable thing for a while now, my shlong, all flighty and unreliable like some stoner uncle who shows up hammered at Thanksgiving and forgets your name.
The guy I see in the mirror, Tom Violet, the same lanky, moody bastard I’ve been looking at for almost thirty-six years now, looks . . . old. The fact that I’m naked certainly isn’t helping. Like most men who are not Brad Pitt, I could do without the sight of my own nudity. Back in the day I was a long-distance runner, all streamlined and put together. Now I’m flabby-thin, the way a fat guy might look after a year in an internment camp. Worse, the hair on my chest is overgrown and dark against my pale skin and I wonder if I should be one of those guys who shaves his chest. Maybe that would help.
Of course it wouldn’t help. That’s not the problem. The problem, still, is my broken wang.
I look at it in the mirror,
really
look at it, and it, too, appears ashamed. It’s shriveled up into itself, like an infant’s thingy. I close my eyes and touch it, and then I squeeze it, just to try to get something going. I think of my wife. She’s lying in bed, not twenty feet away, in a red thing from Victoria’s Secret—just “a fun little thing” she picked up. I actually think
that’s
the problem. Lingerie screams of effort. It screams of forced intimacy and the fact that we both know she’s probably ovulating. We did the math this week. What I need to do is to sneak up on sex. For some strange reason, thinking about getting an erection makes it fucking impossible to get an erection. I tried to explain this to Anna a few weeks ago, but she didn’t get it. I don’t blame her. It’s a very abstract concept.
Maybe it’s the economy. Personal and global financial ruin could cause boner problems, right?
Sadly, no. This all started happening before the world ended. I’ll have to come up with another excuse.
And so I stroke on, like a fool, like a caged monkey masturbating in front of a horrified troop of Cub Scouts at the zoo. There’s a sensation, like a phantom tingling somewhere in my stomach, but then there’s nothing again, and I begin to think about the cruelties of aging. In my carefree youth, sitting in Catholic school, I couldn’t go more than twenty minutes without popping a painful, trouser-lifting boner. Now, with the prospect of actual sex in the other room, I’ve got nothing. Zilch.
How many perfectly good hard-ons have I wasted in my short, stupid life? Hundreds? Probably thousands if you count college. It’s just not fair.
Finally, I turn off the faucet and give up. In the silent bathroom, I give my lifeless manhood one last pleading look and then open the door.
Anna is still in her Victoria’s Secret thing, but she’s de-sexed it a little by putting on her reading glasses. She’s stretched out on our bed reading a
New Yorker
by the light of one of the candles she’s set up. I’ve been trying to jerk myself back to life. She’s been reading “Talk of the Town.”
The stereo is still on, too. It’s playing some CD of classical music fused with nature sounds. It’s supposed to be relaxing or soothing or God knows what. But, of course, it’s just more effort, more unnatural things added to what’s supposed to be the most natural thing in the world.
Our dog, Hank, is skilled at sensing anxiety in a room. He’s sitting on the floor on one of his dog mats. He’s one of those dogs that always seems to be bracing himself for the worst.
Anna smiles and sits up. “Hi,” she says. Her legs on our powder blue sheets are long and toned and treadmill-ready. She’s beautiful, my wife, I recognize this, but my body is somehow rejecting this fact along with all of its sexual implications. If the nineteen-year-old version of Tom Violet were here in this room, he’d slap the thirty-five-year-old version of Tom Violet across the face in utter disgust.
Three nights ago, after our last failed attempt at this, I woke up in the middle of the night to Anna moaning quietly next to me. At first I didn’t know what was going on, and then I realized that she was having a sex dream. In eight years of sleeping beside her nightly, I’d never heard anything like that. As I listened to her whisper her way toward a soft, muted little orgasm, I realized that we had a
real
problem.
I put on a pair of boxers and slide into bed next to her. She rolls over onto her side and looks at me. Her small breasts are vivid against all that silk or satin or whatever those things from Victoria’s Secret are made out of. “You OK?” she asks. Her voice has taken on this funerallike tone, which feels absurd and completely accurate.
I sigh and listen to the music and the sound of some whale or dolphin in the ocean. “No,” I say. “I’m obviously not.”
“It’s not a big deal, you know. It . . . happens.”
This is what women say in these scenes to the men they love. Her eyes and her face are sweet and concerned for me, but there’s enough tension in her voice to know that she’s just reading from the script. It might not have been a big deal the first time, or even the sixth time, but it’s a big deal now, and I wonder what the man in her head looked like who inspired those little noises the other night. Like me with a shaved chest, perhaps—or, at the very least, like me with a fully functioning penis?
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
She takes off her glasses and sets them on the nightstand. Over the sheets, she rubs my knee, and then she inches a little closer. “Maybe you’re just—” but she leaves this hanging. Like me, she doesn’t seem to know exactly what it is that I am. I look down at her feet, and her toenails are painted red. This is something new for her. Her feet are typically very functional things, but lately they’re lotioned and cared for. This simple act of pure femininity would probably be enough to turn the nineteen-year-old version of Tom Violet into a sex-crazed idiot. But here I am, dejected and lustless.
I don’t want to talk about my penis, but I don’t want to blow out the candles and roll over, either. I’m vulnerable, yet simultaneously guarded. I want Anna to hold me and tell me that she loves me, but I also want to sleep in the guest room. I’m like a six-foot-tall version of my own flaccid dick, wanting yet pulling away from my only real ally in the world.
Anna’s an optimist, though, to the bitter end, and so she forges on. Like her ancestors, great, blond Swedes from Nebraska, she’ll continue plowing long-dead fields, even as the locusts converge.
“We haven’t been to the Caribbean in a while,” she says gently, smiling at me. Her face goes flush.
“Anna,” I say, but then I stop. She’s right. We haven’t.
“Maybe that’s where we should go then,” she says, and then she tucks her hair behind each ear. “You like it there, right?”
Two days after we were married, we were on our way to the Caribbean, stuck in the very back row of some medium-size plane from Washington, D.C. We’d had drinks at the airport bar and wine after takeoff. The alcohol, the altitude, and the weird joy of it all were enough to motivate my wife to go down on me as the cabin lights dimmed and a rerun of
Frasier
came on the little drop-down televisions.
She kisses my neck and then my chest and then my stomach, working her way downward. My heart is running and I’m nostalgic as I touch the back of her head. “Just relax,” she whispers.
I close my eyes as she goes about the little routine of swirling kisses and harmless bites.
Then she puts me in her mouth and I hold my breath and concentrate on the rush of sensations. I think of dirty, pornographic things and grit my teeth. I think of swimsuit issues and those creepy phone sex commercials that come on when you can’t sleep. A minute later, I should be as hard as that stupid, ungrateful thirteen-year-old looking down white blouses in Catholic school. But I’m not—not even close.
“Anna,” I say.
“Just
relax
.” She draws the word out, trying to hypnotize my penis. I’m determined to will an erection out of thin air, so I squeeze my eyes shut and concentrate some more. Aside from the lovely wetness of Anna’s mouth, though, there’s only this odd, rubbery little thing that I’ve somehow become.
I say her name again, but she doesn’t stop. It’s so small in her mouth and I feel a fresh wave of that awful humiliation that sent me scrambling to the bathroom ten minutes ago.
“Anna, please!”
Finally, she pulls away, startled, and I cover my stupid penis.
“I’m sorry. I can’t. Shit. I just . . . I’m sorry.”
She wipes her mouth and lies down again to stare at the ceiling. “Tom,” she says. But before she can say anything else, there’s a knock at our door, three small taps.
“Mommy? Daddy?”
Anna sits up and shakes out her hair. “I locked the door,” she whispers, and that somehow makes it even more embarrassing. She’s planned all of this down to the finest details. I briefly wonder if our daughter has been listening to this entire episode, and if so, how badly will she be scarred? I wish I could sink down into this mattress and disappear.
“Mommy? Daddy? Can I come in? Please! Pleeeassse!” She sounds scared.
Anna takes a breath and clears her throat—a mother again. She hops up and opens the door and Allie runs into the room, her eyes noisy and wide. “You guys,” she says.
“What’s up, Allie-Cat?” I say.
Her lower lip is shaking. “There’s a burglar downstairs.”
“A
what
? No, baby. You’re just dreami—”
“Nu-uhh. It’s
not
a dream.” She’s on my side of the bed clutching our comforter, and Anna crouches beside her, smoothing her wild bed-head. “He’s taking away all of our stuff. He’s
stealing
it. I can hear him. And then he’s gonna try to hurt us because robbers can’t leave witnesses. If they do then we’ll be able to pick them out in that room with the glass.”
Thank you,
Law & Order
reruns.
“Sweetie,” I say, but then Hank stands up, the shittiest watchdog in North America, and growls at the door. There are footsteps and then rustling, and my daughter is right. There’s somebody downstairs.
“See,” she says. Tears are about to spill from wide eyes. “I told you.”
“Shit,” I whisper.
I wonder what someone does in a situation like this—all those actors in movies. And then for a moment I do absolutely nothing, as if the situation might simply resolve itself while the three of us sit here in this bedroom breathing. Then I realize that despite what both of them must suspect about me and my abilities as a man, Anna and Allie are looking at me. They’re waiting for me to do something. Waiting for me to protect them. Even Hank is looking at me now, perfectly still, the rigid statue of an ugly little dog.
“OK,” I say, which seems like a good place to start. “You guys stay here. I’m gonna go check it out.”
God help us.